A 'skill' describes a specific knowledge or experience that is either offered by a course (meaning that Learners who complete the course 'get' that skill) or 'required' by a course (meaning that Learners need to have that skill, perhaps by completing another course offering it, in order to take a course).
Of course, the users have specific skills which can be assigned to their profile, other than those offered by the courses they attend.
The Skills sections show you a listing of all skills, along with the category (1) each skill belongs to and the number of users that possess it (2), and has buttons to add a new skill (3) or edit or delete an existing one (4).
The listing of skills can be filtered, to quickly find the one you want to view/edit, it can also be downloaded as an Excel-compatible CSV file (5).
To add a new skill, click the 'Add Skill' button and enter a name (6) and category (7) the skill belongs to, as well as an optional description. Through the Users (8) and the Courses (9) tabs, you can directly assign the skill to users and courses.
Note: In order to find out how you can assign skills to courses visit this article. This one describes how you can assign skills to users. Skill is also used in the Skill gap tests.